INTRODUCTORY

Any dynamic group expects criticism from the outside, but criticism from within is a shockingly different matter. A man's business acquaintances may chide him without real effect, but the strictures of his wife can be an intolerable thorn in the flesh. It is like this with religious groups. So long as the rebukes come only from beyond the party walls, some degree of reason tempers the response and the opposition is likely to get courteous, if cool, treatment. But when the criticism comes from one's own fellows and near kin, emotions may be harder to control.

Some of us within the Church of Christ segment of the Restoration movement, and some recently out of it, have felt it imperative to analyze its failures. This anthology of essays is a criticism of a religious way of life. It is written by men who have remained within the Church of Christ, or by those who have felt they had to seek wider fellowship but still love dearly the people they left behind.

In such an enterprise malice and vindictiveness have no place. The world has too much of both without our adding more. Each contributor to this book was told that his study of Church of Christ short-comings had, above all else, to be compassionate. It has not been our intention to vent spleen, but to expose an unacknowledged disease in the body of a living thing which we love. We criticize not because criticism is a stimulant without which we cannot be happy, but in hope of improvement of a fine people.

For those Church of Christ readers who will, we hope, read this book, we offer what may be the most important of our prefatory comments. Although several writers here represented have left the Church of Christ segment of Christendom, there is no intent to urge a similar exodus for everyone else. Most sensitive men who depart from a childhood church wish they might never have had to do so. This book pleads with the Church of Christ to spare such men the agonies of separation by creating an atmosphere in which independent minds may feel at home.

One fact seems too clear for anyone to overlook. As leaders in all churches are increasingly educated, the tension between party strictures and the free mind will increase dramatically. Men trained to study analytically and critically will not be content with unyielding orthodoxy. They will not submit to coercion. If they are driven out because they will not conform, the result will be intellectual suicide for the churches losing them. With thoughtful men excluded, the stalwarts left behind to guard the walls will be only those who have never dared challenge any tenets of the system, men who can be "counted upon," men who are safely "sound" and "loyal." But knowledge cannot be frozen, nor the quest squelched, nor the adventure stopped arbitrarily at some point in time or place. Real disciples are always on the move toward widening horizons; they cannot walk permanently with a company whose eyes are turned backwards.

Nothing is clearer than that the Church of Christ, along with many other religious groups of similar pattern, is losing men it cannot afford to lose. Intellect alone may be of no value to a Christian group, but intellect wedded to the kind of spirit shown by the essayists in this book provides a commodity too rare in this world to toss away carelessly.

Many in the Church of Christ are completely unaware of how many intelligent, compassionate Christian men and women have departed from them in search of freedom from dogma. As a lifelong member of the Church of Christ I know well the tract racks laden with pamphlets entitled "WHY I LEFT" and dealing with converts to the Church of Christ from Methodism, Mormonism, Presbyterianism, and the like. But I had no idea how many more might be placed there and entitled WHY I LEFT THE CHURCH OF CHRIST. I have been surprised at the number of unusually capable men and women who have quietly slipped away and are now working in other religious establishments. For every one who agreed to express himself in this book, a dozen other equally gifted persons declined for one reason or another.

I can provide an illustration of what I mean. From one small circle of my friends at Freed-Hardeman College, six of the most intelligent and articulate no longer serve in the Church of Christ, although all of them originally trained for the ministry. One of them is an Episcopal priest. None of them are represented in this book. There are hundreds more like them, graduates of our Christian colleges. Those of us who have compiled this book consider that fact significant enough to bring to the attention of our readers. We feel that emphasis on those who left other churches to come to us and complete disregard of our own talent drain is a dangerous distortion. When we know only this side of the story we are blind to facts and there is an ever-present danger of cultivating a superiority complex at the expense of our religious neighbors. If this book does nothing more than to awaken good Church of Christ members to an ominous, steady drain of talented persons, it will be worthwhile.

Since this collection was conceived and carried through on my initiative, I am the proper person to justify it or to suffer for its failure. If I know my motive, it is this: I believe that a great stirring in the Church of Christ betokens the possibility of a more charitable tomorrow. Thousands are restless and dissatisfied with the aridity of exclusivism and authoritarianism. Bright young minds are refusing to be put off with answers that have no more to commend them than the hoary beard of antiquity.

Such people need an articulation of their feeling of sterility; they need a voice to help speak what they sense and help find words for what they feel. And they need a guide to healthier outlooks. While this collection was in progress, a young woman came into my church office seeking help. Near hysteria, this daughter of an orthodox Church of Christ minister had grown dissatisfied with the cold legalisms of he church, but her love for her father was immense and beautiful. Torn terribly between the urgent need to make a change religiously and the desire to remain in her father's good graces, she was near prostration. She doubtless spoke truth when she said in agony, "If I were to change churches my father would die of a heart attack. I would kill my father!"

If this book can contribute to an atmosphere in which such agony need no longer occur, it will be valuable. If it can help a father feel that he may well be delighted if his child leaves the home church so long as her motive is a passionate desire to find for herself the highest and holiest way of worship, it will be abidingly useful. It goes forth with that sincere hope from all of us who had a part in it.

A few of those asked to write felt it would do no good because those who need the essays most would never read them. And those who do read, they said, may read with such bias that they will get no profit. I can only reply that many people helped me find my way from one plateau to another because they committed what they thought to print. If one young man, caught up in the agonies of spiritual travail, desperate and heartsick at the discrepancy between what he sees and what he has been taught, reads a single one of these essays and says, "That's it! That's what I've felt but been unable to say; I see more clearly now the direction my spiritual journey should take," I shall be repaid for every hour spent.

Some will wonder about the variety of sentiments expressed here. It is not only unimportant to us that we do not agree with each other in every detail; it is rather, a matter for rejoicing that in these pages me who accept Jesus as Lord may speak their minds without restrictions. We consider the variety itself a significant part of the lesson this book would teach. Free minds cannot be predicted. The Spirit of God really does move at liberty like the invisible air, and it impels men in various ways. There are writers here who believe in the principle of Restorationism, and men who do not; men who believe in what is loosely called Fundamentalism, and men who do not; men who are restrained and analytical, and men who verge upon the mystical in their rhapsodies about the guidance of God's Spirit. The book obviously means to urge no one way of religious expression, but to plead from such evidence as is here the need for unity in diversity.

This kind of unity would have kept most of the people who left. Few of them were eager to go away. They went reluctantly after becoming convinced that they could live only in the atmosphere of freedom. One of my former college classmates rejecting an invitation to write, said that the only feeling evoked from him by consideration of the world he left behind was sadness. Still another, an Abilene Christian College graduate, said that the emotion-packed years in which he wrestled with the problem of whether to separate or not had left him too numb to make a contribution. He feared, too, that "the folk who really need to read such a book will never have a single look at it. If some do get the copy, they will be unable to read the heart of the message."